A week after Reddit CEO Steve Huffman conceded
that he altered comments of his online critics on the site he
co-founded, Huffman took to Reddit on Wednesday to apologize. He then
unveiled r/all filtering and announced "a more proactive approach to policing" the site.

"I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the
trust you all have in Reddit, and I am sorry to those that I created
work and stress for, particularly over the holidays," he said.
"It is heartbreaking to think that my actions distracted people from
their family over the holiday; instigated harassment of our moderators;
and may have harmed Reddit itself, which I love more than just about
anything."

Over the Thanksgiving holiday week, Huffman committed the ultimate Reddit taboo. He edited negative comments directed at him and substituted his handle with the names of moderators of a pro-Donald Trump subreddit called "r/the_donald."
Huffman, who goes by the handle "spez," was under fire for banning the
"Pizzagate" conspiracy board from the site because of breaches to a
policy about posting personal information about others.

Huffman, in his Wednesday post, said he
wouldn't commit that Reddit sin again and that he hopes to regain the
Reddit community's trust.

While many users across the site
found what I did funny or appreciated that I was standing up to the
bullies (I received plenty of support from users of r/the_donald),
many others did not. I understand what I did has greater implications
than my relationship with one community, and it is fair to raise the
question of whether this erodes trust in Reddit. I hope our transparency
around this event is an indication that we take matters of trust
seriously. Reddit is no longer the little website my college roommate, u/kn0thing,
and I started more than 11 years ago. It is a massive collection of
communities that provides news, entertainment, and fulfillment for
millions of people around the world, and I am continually humbled by
what Reddit has grown into. I will never risk your trust like this
again, and we are updating our internal controls to prevent this sort of
thing from happening in the future.

Along those lines, he said that the current
climate of disrespect on Reddit "is not sustainable," and relying on
moderators isn't enough. He said "we are now taking a more proactive
approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit."

We have identified hundreds of the most toxic
users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to
timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no
longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular
listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The
sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or
highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting,
which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a
manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.

We will continue taking on the most
troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation
improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose
users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.

Huffman also said in his Wednesday post that he was enabling filtering for all r/all users.

"Users have long asked to be able to customize
r/all by removing specific communities they don't want to see. We
enabled this personalization," Huffman said in an e-mail to Ars.

Disclosure: Ars and Reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications.